Nate Silver Quotes

Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.

There's a lot of work to be done in the polling world, and a need to continue to rethink how we do what we do. We also need to be more open to the idea that any one input - in this case, polls - may not be the only way to hear what people are saying.

I'm a believer in the polls, by the way. Rarely do you see a poll that's very far off.

If you believe these polls, you're making a mistake.

For 'Power of 10,' you can look at the methodology at CBS.com, it's a company called Rasmussen Reports. We poll thousands and thousands of people for each question, a real cross section of the United States.

Polls are only good for dogs.

I don't pay a lot of attention to polls.

The media uses polls to create news stories. I think polls are just an extension of the editorial page, an excuse to get them on the front page. You can ask any question you want, get any answer you want, and then run around with that as a news story.

I'm a pollster by trade, so I'm into things that are actually quantifiable.

You cannot be driven by the polls. The polls change all the time; they're easily manipulated by whoever wants to ask those poll questions; they go up; they go down.

Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.

You can't depend on polls.

Polls are inaccurate in my opinion, based upon anecdotal evidence, based upon people that I know.

Surveys give us a way of finding out what people across the country are thinking.

We don't base our opinions on the Gallup Poll.

I've learned a long time ago not to take polls too seriously.

I don't put a lot of stock into polls.

I have never had an interest in opinion polls. They are merely an indicator, that's all.

Every time I think that political analysts and writers will finally recognize that most of them don't understand much about political polls, they prove me wrong. They don't know how to read them; they don't understand the importance of cross tabs within a given poll, and they don't know how to analyze them.

I think polling methodology is broken.

I don't put too much stock in polls.

I know that a lot of people love to say that polls are wrong or don't matter, and from time to time they are - it depends on who they are polling.

Some guy once told me that skydiving is like cutting your throat and seeing if you can get to the doctor before you bleed to death.

Opinion polls are not worth the paper they are written on, in my view, through the conference season. They don't settle down again until November.

I generally believe in polls. Scientific polls are accurate.